Subscribe For Free! Sign up to receive the print magazine six times per year and the e-mail newsletter twice a month. Learn more >
Two pharmaceuticals and one medical device package were among those to win the Institute of Packaging Professionals’ 2007 AmeriStar Awards. In the Pharmaceutical and Drug category, Mylan Pharmaceuticals chose MeadWestvaco Health & Beauty Packaging’s Shellpak (shown) to answer Wal-Mart's challenge to its generic prescription drug producers to provide cost-effective, patient-adherence packaging.
Noting that some 850 million people around the world are starving, Ipack-Ima CEO Guido Corbella told journalists at an April 25 press briefing during interpack in Dusseldorf, Germany, that an international summit on the subject of world hunger would be part of Ipack-Ima 2009. Supported by the United Nations and the Italian Ministry for Agricultural, Environmental and Food Policies, the proposed summit is aimed at identifying contributions that food production and packaging systems can make in a global effort to address the problem of world hunger.
Packaged wet wipes give hospital personnel and patients a weapon to fight the spread of bacteria. Sustainable packaging of these wipes could be next. ...The healthcare community is understandably concerned with the spread of diseases such as MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), or staph, and C. Diff (Clostridium Difficile), a diarrheal disease. One way to combat such diseases, either in a medical facility or at home, is through hygiene, which may include the use of specialized wet wipes, contract-manufactured and packaged by Fredonia, WI-based Guy & O’Neill, Inc. for a wide range of customers and applications.
Synchronized lines, rather than individual pieces of equipment, will be a focus of pharmaceutical manufacturers, predicts PMMI’s Ben Miyares. In this exclusive Q&A interview with Healthcare Packaging, Miyares addresses multiple healthcare packaging-related issues, including mechatronics and robotics, which, he says, "have the potential to transform the development of packaging equipment." He also looks at sustainability, packaging equipment purchase considerations, E-machinery, and counterfeiting topics.
Pharmaceutical firms seek packaging line improvements to cut costs, biologics present packaging challenges, and medical device growth is driven by aging baby boomers. These treatment advances bode well for the healthcare/life sciences packaging community. Packaging materials need to offer protection from point of manufacture to the “last mile” where healthcare products reach a patient. Packaging materials must provide barriers for moisture, oxygen, light and heat, and they may include overt and/or covert security measures to combat counterfeiting and diversion. Equipment will need to package products more efficiently, be validatable and versatile.
• Biopharmaceutical and biomedical technologies and treatments will be advanced in large part by developing countries. Although only 5% to 7% of biological products now in clinical development will actually make it to the market, they will play an important role as the life sciences industry begins to develop custom solutions for individual patients rather than focusing exclusively on the larger market. But such treatments will require a change in packaging and processing methods, as well as regulatory procedures.
This summer, Highland Laboratories, Mt. Angel, OR, began to replace its more than 200 opaque and amber PET bottles used for dietary supplements with similar containers made of polylactic acid from NatureWorks LLC. PLA is a bioplastic derived from corn.
RN Fran Koch of Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas examined ‘Healthcare Practitioner and Patient Needs’ at HealthPack 2006.
“Flipping,” Koch explains, is the art of opening a package in the OR. A person standing just outside the sterile field pulls the pack apart from two sides and flips the product out of the pack and onto the table on the sterile field. It isn’t the best practice, Koch admitted, “but it works well and surgeons are renowned for it.”
Another packaging-related concern in the OR, she explained, is that “packaging waste can be a real issue. Two 55-gal trash bags may be filled with waste” during a surgical procedure. Koch addressed how packaging can make life difficult in the OR. Her comments at the March 14 conference session also included the following:
A 1980s-vintage series of TV commercials stated, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” The same could be said for two registered nurses who delivered presentations March 14 at HealthPack 2006 in Dallas. But that should come as no surprise since they represented “the customer” to the event’s medical device-related audience. Coincidentally, “The Voice of the Customer” served as the conference’s theme.
